


Not Unusual

by Senket



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Academy Era, M/M, mckirk minibang 2016
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-06
Updated: 2016-04-06
Packaged: 2018-05-31 15:36:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,496
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6476032
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Senket/pseuds/Senket
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>based on the prompt: "Academy era, lots of bickering, clear fondness between a friendly insult and and a worried scold (not just from Bones)" Leonard McCoy has all the clues, he just has to put them together in the right order.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not Unusual

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thenizu](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thenizu/gifts).



Leonard McCoy has never been a morning person. Many of his fellow surgeons in Atlanta used to laugh about it: the great surgeon Doctor McCoy up for twenty, thirty hours just fine, and yet totally incomprehensible before his second cup of coffee. The coffee maker in his single is, in theory, not regulation, but McCoy will be damned if they try to take it away from him.

That morning however, finds him waking so late he only has time to throw on the first clean-smelling uniform he finds before booking it across the quad to Medical for the Andorian Dissection module. He feels oddly cold throughout it, even considering the chill of the morgue, his fingers tingling in a way that tell him, practised physician that he is, that his hands lack proper circulation. Puzzled, he sheds the outer layer of his uniform, slinging the jacket over the arm of his red turtleneck. Blood rushes into his body, a wash of prickling and heat that subsided into warmth. He sighs a long breath of relief, slumping, and bears out the rest of class with only the faint irritation of a student reviewing information that he’s already dealt with professionally in life. Andorians, while still considered fairly exotic by nature of their four sexes, are not wholly absent from Earth, and he’s worked on one or two before coming to the Academy. The jacket, however, is a more interesting question. The fabric is synthetic, and therefore does not lend itself to shrinking. He resolves to investigate the matter later.

The answer, as it were, would come to him in a much more literal sense than he imagined.

\--

“Morning Bones!” As usual, he hears Jim Kirk before he sees him. Feels him before he sees him, as it were. Leonard turns his head slowly, first to the hand suddenly clasped onto his shoulder and then, following it up, to the blond beaming down at him, far too chipper. 

“Is it still morning?” He asks, eyeing the younger man suspiciously. Something seems off about Jim’s shape, as if he were broader in the shoul- Leonard reaches out to smack the boy on the back of the head. 

“Ow, what the hell Bones?”

“Infant.”

“What did I do now?”

In lieu of answering, the older cadet throws the jacket still slung over his arm at the boy’s head.

That should have been his first clue.

\--

A week later he stumbles into his dorm at midnight, a spray of green blood speckling his left shoulder, drops dry as high as his jawline, interrupted suddenly where a surgical mask protected his face. All he wants is a shower and some sleep. Thoughts of a thorough massage drift in and out of his head, but he’s sure the moment his head hits cotton he’s going to sleep.

Uncoordinated by exhaustion, he knocks his shin into the coffee table putting his bag down, swears vividly. Jim appears from the bathroom, dressed in sweatpants and a too-big Academy shirt, his hair wet. The boy immediately hones in on Leonard like a goddamn puppy, all big-eyed and wanting to help. “The hell are you doing here?” McCoy asks, his eyes narrowed suspiciously on the other cadet.

Jim smiles disarmingly, shrugs as he helps Leonard sit, peels the man’s jacket off without asking. “Word was you got trapped in a surgery way above your pay grade doing clinical, so I came to make sure you’d eat something before knocking out.”

“Which one of us is the doctor here?” He grumbles, batting Jim’s hands away. Jim laughs, jumping over to Leonard’s micro-kitchenette to pull some takeout from his miniature fridge. Leonard’s eyes narrow on the boy’s slim figure, on the too-big shoulders of his shirt and the too-long sleeves, kissing Jim’s elbows. “Are you stealing my clothes?”

“Yep.” He beams when he turns around. Leonard is absolutely sure far too many people have let Jim get away with far too much because of that blasted smile. “I went for a run, so my clothes are gross. Tossed ‘em in the cleaning unit.”

“You couldn’t have just stopped by your place?”

“Nah. I wanted to make sure I got back before you.”

Leonard narrows his gaze on Jim. Seeming to sense the incoming argument, Jim shoves a piece of spicy calamari into Leonard’s mouth, smiling all the time.

\--

Leonard wakes to the smell of coffee. That, in itself, is not unusual. After the debacle with the clothes switch, Jim bought him a coffee machine with a timer, so that it brews itself in the morning before he’s even awake and all he has to do is stumble over to it and pour himself a cup. It’s the undertone of seared fish that surprises him, and by the time he manages to untangle himself from his covers and shuffle blearily out of his bedroom, there’s a plate waiting on the coffee table with peppered salmon on toast next to a steaming coffee. He grunts something, rubbing at his eyes, and Jim laughs.

“I’ve lived on my own since I was seventeen, you think I never learned how to cook? I had to impress all those one-night stands somehow,” he says, as if campus gossip focused on his morning-after manner and not his vivacious. Excited. Curious. Exploratory. Keen. ...nature. Leonard groans, curling up and hiding in his mug of coffee.

“Don’t you have somewhere to be?” He eventually mutters as Jim, the worst kind of morning person, smiles sunnily and refills his coffee cup for the second time. Jim points at the PADD propped up on Leonard’s tiny counter, as if that answers anything.

“I went for a run long before you woke up, don’t worry.”

“Classes?”

“It’s Saturday.”

“Don’t you-”

“Oh, yeah, the hand-to-hand class. Commander Beckett is testing out the cadets today, so he doesn’t need my assistance. He says he needs to make sure they can remember their training without me around. Something something the psychology of learning.”

Leonard knows the term Jim is looking for: state-dependent memory. The casual way with which the command-track cadet throws away the reference tells him Jim is annoyed that he doesn’t remember the particular name of the effect he’s talking about. But he’s tired and not awake and it’ll do Jim good to have something to stew over for a minute or two, if only to slow him down, so the doctor nibbles on his toast, nurses his coffee, and settles back into a half-drowse, even as Jim sits too close to him on the couch, props his feet up on the table next to Leonard’s plate, and keeps studying.

\--

Something hits him in the head. Leonard jerks up. He looks over at Jim, but the boy appears to be engrossed in his book. It’s solid, an old hardback so worn the lettering has faded entirely from the spine. The pages are warped and colored by the oil of a thousand fingerprints. The Odyssey, at a guess. Jim has a lust for classics, and he quotes that and Shakespeare more than anything.

Leonard frowns, returns to his notes. 

Something hits him in the head.

He leaps to his feet. “What the hell, Jim?”

“Mmmm?” The blond peers at Bones over the edge of his book, his expression guileless. Or so he wanted Leonard to think. “What’d I do now?”

“You keep throwing things at me!”

Jim pointed at himself, batting his lashes at his friend. “Moi?”

“Yes, you!”

He huffs, snapping the book shut. He knows it backwards and forwards. He probably doesn’t need a bookmark to know exactly which page he was on. Asshole of a genius. But Jim looks cross, hugging the tome to his chest. “What makes you think I was doing anything? I’m just sitting here. Reading.” He shakes the book, as if that proves anything.

“Excuse you, self-proclaimed God of Double-Tasking, but there’s no one else here.”

Jim snorts, rolling his eyes. “The window’s open,” he points out, sauntering out of Leonard’s dorm with his book, leaving his jacket, turtleneck and bag behind on the couch.

Leonard turns to lean out the window. He’s on the third floor but, sure enough, Gaila is down on the grass far beneath it. She waves happily at the doctor. A minute later, Jim appears, slinging his arm in hers. He watches them walk away with eyes narrowed.

He always studies near the window if he can, especially now, in spring, before the summer fog rolls into San Francisco and chills everything. They planned that.

Leonard whirls around, grabbing his PADD, and sends Jim a message. “Stop getting your friends to prank me.”

Jim sends back a winking face twenty minutes later.

\--

It’s probably around two in the afternoon, but with the windows on five percent transparency it feels like midnight in his room. As if midterms weren’t enough, Leonard is coming off an overnight shift. The only thing he wants to do is sleep until tomorrow, maybe interspersed with a meal or two and an episode of something, but definitely nothing that requires more energy than sitting up for twenty minutes.

As usual, Jim is out to ruin everything.

“Bones! There’s a game of ultimate frisbee going on in the quad, come be my secret weapon!”

“No.” He rolls over, pulling the covers higher up over his head.

Jim jumps on the bed, grabbing Leonard’s shoulders through the issue comforter, and shakes him. “Come on. They’re all security crew, they won’t know what hit ‘em.”

Leonard regrets telling Jim about his adolescent athletics career. Frequently. He manages to untangle one arm, which he flails weakly in Jim’s direction, trying to swat him away. Jim responds by flattening himself over Leonard. The doctor hasn’t opened his eyes, but he’s 80% sure the blond is pouting, staring down at him with round blue eyes. “Sleeping.”

“Bones it’s so nice outside. Everything’s done, we have a week of leave, come play!”

“Sleeping.”

“Booooooooooooooooooones.” Jim Kirk is wiggling on top of him, whining.

Leonard has a baby girl. Joanna was six when he and Joce divorced, conceived between high school and their wedding. He wasn’t home enough for her, he knows that, but he learned a ton from her all the same, and one of the things you learn rearing a child with energy is how to get them to shut up when you don’t have a spark of life in you.

Leonard heaves himself up just enough to knock Jim over. His arms come out from under the comforter to wraps around Jim’s torso, pinning his arms to his side. He rolls them over so Jim is beside him, throws a leg over the boy to weigh him down into the mattress. “Sleep.”

“But frisbee!”

Whenever Jim tries to wiggle his way up again, Leonard tightens his arms. Jim kicks his legs out, searching for purchase, and Bones just pinches his side. After another minute of halfhearted struggling, Jim huffs out a breath of defeat. Leonard smirks into his pillow. He loosens his grip, but doesn’t remove it: no point in giving the excitable brat ideas.

\--

When he wakes up again, an hour or two later, hungry and overheating, he finds that the covers have been kicked off. Jim is still pressed against him, though, snuffling quietly against Leonard’s shoulder, apparently fast asleep.

He’s dead sure he’s never seen the younger man sleep before.

Leonard untangles himself slowly, careful not to wake him, intent on ordering some food. A small sound catches his attention as he reaches the door. He turns to face Jim, curious. The younger man curls in on himself. He mutters something unintelligible. Tension bites into him, turns him hard, draws his eyebrows down into a pained frown.

Despite himself, Leonard finds himself moving back to Jim, ruffling the boy’s hair gently. He checks his pulse out of reflex, a soft touch against the skin of his throat.

Jim snaps awake. He’s standing on the other side of the bed in the blink of an eye. Leonard cocks an eyebrow. The boy looks embarrassed, but he covers it with a grin in lightning speed. “Now frisbee?”

Leonard snorts, turning to shuffle out into the lit living space and find his communicator. “You’re insufferable.”

Jim follows like the pup he is.

\--

Jim drags Bones to the bar for a second time that week. That in itself is hardly unusual. Starfleet Academy is stressful already, but being trapped with that many idealistic, inexperienced teenagers always sends him for a spin, and Jim certainly agrees with him on that count. They leave all the other cadets to their Polk street bar crawls and their Castro clubs that week, and instead Jim leads them to a little hole-in-the-wall bar and restaurant that looks like it’s been running for three centuries, that would’ve been shut down for something more expensive and more hip if it hadn’t been attached to a hotel, if people didn’t still crave little pockets of the past here and there.

It’s quiet, for a bar. People are playing cards at the back table but not betting. Jim enthuses about the honest-to-god popcorn machine for about twenty minutes, stopping only to grab a second bowlful. The drinks are strong here too, Jim tells him, and cheap, but when you drink your bourbon straight, not much changes via alcohol content. Between two rounds of drinks, Leonard goes to the bathroom. He comes back to find Jim sitting at their table, quietly watching people around him while he shovels popcorn into his mouth.

That- is a little stranger. There’s a stunning pair of brunettes not two tables over, and they’ve all but pulled their skirts up for Jim. He expected they’d both be at his and Jim’s table by now, sandwiching the blond between them and giggling far too much.

“What’s up with you?”

“Hm?”

Jim tears his eyes away from the card game at the end of the room, squinting at the light just over Leonard’s shoulder. “That guy in the hat is losing on purpose.”

Leonard arches an eyebrow at Jim. The blond shrugs. He turns to watch the group over his shoulder. He doesn’t know what game they’re playing, but ‘that guy in the hat’ watches one of the players with a shy half-smile instead of looking at his cards at all, so he doesn’t doubt Jim is right.

If you asked anyone on campus what they thought regarding Jim and people-watching, they’d laugh in your face. If you asked Leonard what he thought about that, he’d tell you everyone was an idiot, and besides, none of those people know shit about James T. Kirk... but that’s a cross Jim bears on purpose, so he’d probably be a decent friend and shut his mouth about it instead. Yell at Jim about it later.

They make it back to campus that night without incident. No fights, no forlorn ex-lovers (ex-lovers is a laugh anyway, he can count on one hand the amount of times Jim went back to the same person for seconds), no drooling sycophants or furious meat-heads looking to raise their status by pulling the infamous Jim Kirk down a peg or twelve. Instead there’s silence, companionship and, inevitably, Jim’s arm slung over his shoulders. Or Jim’s hands pulling him around by the sleeve. Or the weight of a full-grown man too drunk to stand on his own and always, always seeking body heat around him. It’s unusual, but not strange.

What’s strange is the intent expression Jim gets when they reach Leonard’s dorm. He stands in the doorway while Leonard stumbles in to sit on the couch, bent low over his lap to take his boots off. Leonard can’t see Jim’s expression: the lights are off except for the glow from outside haloing the younger cadet. It’s the stillness that bothers him. 

“The hell are you thinking about, kid?”

He snaps back into motion, following Leonard into the dorm space. His head hangs loose from his shoulders. He leans heavily against the wall, clumsily taking his own shoes off. The second one sticks, laces still tied. He hops around trying to pull it off and nearly trips, slamming his upper body back into the wall so he doesn’t fall. Leonard bursts into hysterical high-pitched snickering. Jim’s head comes up like a puppy hearing his name. He grins at Bones, throwing the shoe over his shoulder towards the door. On automatic, it slides open, and his shoe lands outside the dorm. Bones ramps up to a bellowing laugh as Jim does a comical double take, his eyes big and glassy and so blue. The blond toddles over to Bones, crawling over the coffee table on his hands and knees to make it onto the couch, where he curls up against the other man.

Leonard slings an arm over the back of the couch, sinking a little lower so that Jim’s shoulder doesn’t press awkwardly into his ribs. He breathes deep, a pleasant buzz warming him from the inside out, relaxed by the weight of Jim’s body against him. “Didn’t realize you were that drunk.”

“Maybe I’m not,” Jim teases. Leonard snorts in response. 

The next morning he wakes up stretched out on the couch, sunlight cutting through him. Jim shifts against his side, escaping the light by hiding his face against Leonard’s stomach, and sleeps on.

\--

This jacket isn’t Leonard’s size. He pulls it off and tries a second one. This one isn’t his size either. The third one he tries fits. He stumbles out of the bedroom and there’s already a cup of coffee waiting, and a note from Jim he doesn’t bother to read. He takes a sonic shower after his first cup. The sonic fixture and the water head share the same space, so he can see three bottles of various washing solutions that aren’t his as he leans against the tiles.

That toothbrush isn’t his, either.

He stumbles back to the kitchenette for his second cup of coffee, attempting to reread yesterday’s lecture notes before class. It doesn’t go swimmingly. This coffee isn’t strong enough, he hasn’t slept enough, he has a test in an hour and a massive headache.

Jim comes bursting in with pastries, grinning, gleaming with sweat from his run and far, far too excited. Bones is going to kill him, just so he doesn’t have to deal with his incessant cheer.

“Chocolate muffin or spinach croissant?” He drops the bag in front of Bones without waiting for an answer, waltzes into the bathroom and then out again with a towel draped over his shoulders, rubbing it one-handed against his hair. He sits next to Leonard, banging their knees together, and takes away his PADD. “Name all four Andorian sexes.”

“That’s not even what the test is about, you brat.”

Jim grins at him before turning his attention to Leonard’s notes. He reads like lightning, hm-ing here and ah-ing there and if he didn’t know Jim Kirk as well as he did he’d be pissed that the boy seemed to pick anything up in a flash. The damned truth is the kid works hard, and works harder at making it look effortless. 

Ten minutes and a blissful cup of coffee later, Jim looks up. “Okay. What do you want to start with, Edosian taxonomy?”

The thing is, Leonard checks his notes out of reflex. He knows exactly what he’s doing, medically speaking. But he’s realizing, in this moment, that he’s very behind on the whole people aspect. Jim cocks his head, looking up. He blinks and leans back slightly when he finds Leonard scrutinizing him. His guard comes up a little, and Leonard sees it in the tension around his eyes, the way his smile doesn’t reach anywhere but his mouth. “What’s up?”

“Did you move in without telling me?”

Jim laughs. There’s a touch of hysteria that eats into Leonard almost instantly. His mood, already sour, burns down.

“Sort of.”

“What the hell do you mean, ‘sort of’? Either you did or you didn’t.”

“Sort of.” It’s petulant this time, and that rankles. Jim isn’t looking at him. Instead he’s scrolling up and down and sideways through Bones’s notes, skipping around from subject to subject without reading. His jaw is set, his teeth working on his bottom lip.

“Kid, I haven’t seen you this jumpy since your last trip to Medical.”

Jim stares at him for three heartbeats too long, stone-faced, before turning back to the notes. “Arcturian then?”

“Jim.”

Jim twists away to fish a pastry out of the bag he brought, shoving it at Bones. “Seriously where do you want to start?”

“Why are you trying to distract me?”

“We’re dating.”

Leonard pauses. The words don’t materialize in any meaningful way. “What?”

“I said we’re dating. That’s the thing that’s happening. The moving in thing is incidental.”

“What?” It’s not the pair of brunettes thrown into sudden light, but the new wording on a request he heard a thousand times. ‘Do you want to go out with me tonight?’ It hadn’t even occurred to him.

“Good luck with your test.” Jim drops the PADD on the counter, snatches up the pastry bag and simultaneously tosses the towel down on Leonard’s table as he leaves. He’s already out the door before Leonard even manages to stand up, tripping on his own feet trying to follow the boy out.

\--

He hasn’t spoken to Jim in three days, despite a series of increasingly frustrated messages sent to the boy’s communicator. Oh, he sees him plenty, but Jim has a whole lot of admirers and he’s suddenly never alone.

That itself is not unusual, other people might say, but those other people don’t know Jim Kirk like Leonard does. They don’t realize that he was the one Jim was always with.

Or they do, because Uhura sits across from him on day three with an impatiently parental expression. Apparently, Jim’s been crashing xenolinguistics club harder than usual. She’s the goddess of vocal stresses, which is why the only defence against Nyota knowing all your secrets is saying nothing at all. “Please god talk to him before his bad mood explodes all over innocent people.”

“He seems happy enough to me,” Leonard growls. He can see Jim behind Nyota, six tables down and regaling a dozen cadets with some exploit requiring overblow hand motions and a whole lot of cocky grins.

Nyota stares him down dead, an eyebrow cocked. She seems unimpressed.

“Are you stealing my looks?” he grumbles, chastised, his shoulders sinking down.

“I’m merely speaking your language, Leonard.”

“Why am I friends with you, anyway?”

“You needed someone sensible in your life.”

He snorts. She’d throw herself into danger same as the rest of the idiots. She might think carefully about it, but she’d do it anyway. “Sensible my ass.”

“Speaking of ‘your ass,’” she leans her head, gesturing minutely to the loud table behind her, “he’s driving everyone crazy. Kiss and make up already.”

He doesn’t have the energy to boggle about it. If anyone knew he was dating Jim before he did, it’d be Nyota. And lying to her really is so, so pointless. “I’m trying. The idiot won’t talk to me.”

She observes him for a long time, so long that Leonard resumes eating out of a sort of defence, hiding behind his chicken salad.

“Well,” she says finally, drinking her Vulcan spice tea, “talk to him or I may kill him soon.”

\--

He gets his chance, but not the way he wants.

“Congratulations, Dr. McCoy,” Puri tells him over the sound of voices shouting from the end of the hall. “You’ve been voted Medical’s Scariest Doctor, and so the problem patient goes to you.” He jams a file into Leonard’s hands and evacuates immediately. Puri has better things to do, always.

Leonard glances at the file for half a second before he’s stomping towards the commotion, swearing inarticulately.

Jim is trying to leave, of course. Three different nurses are trying to wrestle him into one of the diagnostics rooms. His right eye is swelling rapidly, bulging and dark with blood. His knuckles are smeared with blood, though it’s hard to tell whether or not it’s his own. He’s definitely heading towards at least one disciplinary hearing, and he’ll be heading for a second if he’s not a little more careful about where his hands are landing.

“I am perfectly capable of taking care of myself,” he shouts over the other voices, tearing out of Nurse Shvel’kar’s grip.

“You’re perfectly capable of bleeding all over yourself,” someone answers waspishly.

“I’ve lived through worse.”

“Who hasn’t?”

“That’s enough,” McCoy snaps. “Drop him. Cadet Kirk, inside.”

One nurse turns to him to try to explain the situation- he stops her with a raise of his hand. One drops Jim. The third holds on to the cadet’s out-of-uniform leather jacket, his expression strained by frustration.

Jim snaps to attention, tugging his clothes straight. His expression is mutinous for a moment. He starts to argue, but McCoy isn’t having it.

“Inside.”

There must be something on his face. Defeat crumbles Jim immediately. The boy shakes his shoulder to make the last nurse release him, turning tail to slink into the examination room.

He follows, and when he shuts the door behind him he’s overcome by the sudden stab of quiet. It feels dark in here, cloistered, too small. Jim stares at the wall, doesn’t react when Bones touches him, clinically or otherwise. The doctor cleans his patient’s knuckles in silence. There’s relief in the lack of bruising, in the slice between his third and fourth knuckle, because it means Jim didn’t fight back. It’s twisted that he can breathe easier for that, but he’ll be damned if Jim gets kicked out of the Academy now.

“Are you going to tell me what happened?”

Jim glances at him. The bloodshot eye is no longer visible under the swelling, but Leonard will deal with that in a minute. A century ago, that eye would be shot for days, if not weeks. Now there’ll be no sign of damage by tomorrow’s classes. That’s progress. Progress is strange.

Jim continues to be silent.

“Are you going to talk to me ever again?”

Jim turns his gaze back to the wall.

“You’re being childish.”

Jim shrugs.

Anger builds in his chest. He wants to hit Jim, but of course he can’t. He wants to do- something. Anything. He wants to break a table, he wants to turn into a whirlwind. He wants to drain out his anger until he’s empty, because exhaustion feels better than this. 

It’s not fair. He hasn’t done anything. He hasn’t rejected anyone. He wasn’t told anything, and now because he’s not psychic, because Jim is written in fifteen different languages he’s only half-learned how to read, because Jim hides the best and worst parts of himself in pockets of bravado and carefully-crafted deflections, he’s being cut out?

He grips Jim’s chin a little too hard getting a good look at the bruising on his face, and ignores the involuntary flinch.

“If I learned anything from my divorce, it’s that a relationship doesn’t work when people don’t talk to each other.”

A flash of anger darkens Jim’s one visible eye. He slaps Leonard’s hand away and tries to stand. The force with which Leonard pushes him back down surprises both of them, but Leonard’s too angry to give pause.

“Stop avoiding me!”

“Why?”

“Because I care about you, you asshole!”

“You’re doing just fine without me.”

He’s going to punch Jim’s fucking lights out.

“Am I? Take a good fucking look.”

He’s not a disaster. It takes a lot for Leonard McCoy to become a disaster again. He’s lonely, though, strung out. He can’t get to sleep at night and he’s drinking too much coffee in the morning, even for him. His reputation at medical for dealing with the hard-to-deal-with has been getting stronger, as evidenced by Puri’s behavior, and it’s because he’s losing his temper harder and faster than before. He’s exhausted and on permanent alert, because nobody’s coming over to force him to take five minutes for himself.

He’d be miserable anyway. Jim is the closest friend he’s had in a long, long time. Jim isn’t only ignoring him; he’s surrounding himself with a wall of people, protecting himself against intrusion. He’s treating him like the enemy. He’s in pain. It’s unfair.

Jim drops his gaze. He sucks his bottom lip into his mouth, chews it- it’s already raw. Leonard shouldn’t kick the boy while he’s down, but he feels suckered. He doesn’t even know why he’s being punished.

“What the hell are you scared of?”

Jim shrugs again.

“I swear to fucking god, Jim,” Bones growls. He tears himself away to fetch the dermal regenerator, some part of him afraid he’ll actually try to hurt the blond. He busies himself calibrating the tool, sure that fury is scribbled across his face, hiding the mess of anguish and confusion trapped beneath it.

“...I don’t know.”

He whirls around. Jim’s looking at him now. His face is screwed up, angry or exhausted, like he’s tasting something sour. He’s pulled his legs up on the biobed and they’re up in front of him like a shield. He looks, for the first time, as young as the other cadets, as confused and uncertain as the teenagers Leonard used to see when he had his own practice.

“I just...” Jim does something complex with his mouth, with his hands. He doesn’t look straight at Bones while he searches for words, lost in his own head. He gives up abruptly, shrugs again, trying to shake off the melancholy weighing him down. “I don’t know.”

Leonard sits down at the edge of the bed, the regenerator between his long fingers. He plays with it without awareness, turns it over and over in his hands as he looks at Jim. He tries to read him and finds himself choked by the distance Jim has forced between them.

Inevitably, his mind drifts to the silence squeezing his throat. It reminds him of his divorce. And it’s there, unpredictably, that he finds his answer: in the fear eating him from the inside that kept him in place for long months, when he already knew what was wrong and didn’t want to say it, when he kept the word ‘affair’ trapped behind his teeth because naming a thing gives it power.

It makes no sense, logically, but to Leonard McCoy it’s so simple he almost hates himself for not realizing it sooner.

“You think now that you’ve said it out loud it can go away.”

Jim jerks, meets his eye with a look half-fear half-amazement. Leonard snorts. He touches Jim’s face delicately, brings up the dermal regenerator to focus on his swollen eye, gently presses his thumb above the damage to check for bone fractures as the veins reform beneath skin. He lets the silence transform itself between them, edge out the fear and frustration biting at his chest until it settles. He waits until Jim’s face is fixed, yellowed by the settled pool of blood under skin, tender but whole.

“You’re an idiot.” His voice is soft, as gentle as his touch. The damage is purely cosmetic, thankfully. Leonard sets the regenerator on the small table beside the bed but stays in Jim’s space. “We weren’t dating.”

Jim reacts immediately. He tries to throw himself to his feet, to climb out from the hole he’s suddenly found himself trapped in. It’s amazing how lightning-quick he reacts to things, but Leonard knows Jim. He’s prepared. He grips the headboard, presses Jim in place with his torso. One arm wraps around the squirming boy, traps his arms against his side. Jim tries to leave again and Bones makes him stay, grounds him until the wind blows out of him and the blond sinks back to earth.

Jim hides his face but Leonard knows him. He drops the headboard to run his fingers through the young man’s hair, curls them under Jim’s chin to lift his head. He kisses Jim’s forehead, kisses where the bruises were a minute ago, kisses his cheeks. Quietly, gently, with an aching, slow, tenderness and a breath of pressure, he kisses the corner of Jim’s mouth where the skin is chapped and chewed up.

Jim whimpers, sinks into his bones. Leonard pulls the blond against him, presses them chest to chest and cheek to cheek, turns his head to kiss the boy’s hair. “Now we’re dating.”

“...Bones.”

“Shut up, Jim. Give me a minute. If you think I’m not still going to yell at you a lot about this week you’ve got another thing coming. On the subject, this is the one and only time you are ever getting PDA while I’m on the clock.”

Jim smirks against his throat. That doesn’t bode well, but nothing about Jim ever does. Inexplicably, it always ends up being worth it, anyway.


End file.
